And she knew she didn’t want to be eaten by a monster with that many teeth.
Unthinking, Neve followed the same pattern Solmir had. Her hands thrust out, and without her trying, darkness flowed down her veins, her fingers bending into fists as it gathered in her palms. It felt like winter, like biting wind, making her center so cold it was almost burning.
The burning cold went down her arms, settled in her hands, and when it was too much to bear, her fists opened.
Her own net of spiny magic snared the worm-thing right as its jaws came close enough to touch.
The effect was immediate. Where Solmir’s thorns had seemed only to slow the thing down, Neve’s stopped it cold. It writhed, shrieking into the gray sky, growing smaller as it withered away from the places where Neve’s magic touched it. Curls of shadow spilled off its body, clouding the air, making a sort of chittering noise that was a strange, smaller echo of the worm-monster’s bellows. A crack, another burst of gibbering shadow, and the thing was gone.
The shadows that were left raced into the forest, and Solmir grimaced after them, raising a hand and then letting it fall. “Shit,” he muttered. “Well. We can get them next time. The power of a few shadow-creatures won’t make much of a difference.”
Neve stared wide-eyed at the space where the monster had been, her chest heaving beneath her nightgown as the darkness slowly faded from her veins. She was cold, so cold all over, water dripping from one palm where a thin scrim of ice had covered it. “I thought you said nothing could die here?”
“Did you see all those shadows?” He arched a brow, cool and collected, as if they hadn’t just thrown magic at a giant worm that apparently wanted to eat them. “Those were scraps of the lesser beast. Its energy transmuted. Anything that appears to die here isn’t gone, it just changes form.”
Her mouth opened to question him further, to make a snide remark about how maybe if she threw magic at him, he’d change into a form that would be less irritating. But the white-hot flash of pain in her head cleared her mouth of anything but a moan.
Knees in the dirt, hands at her temples. Neve felt simultaneously as if she were being compacted down and flying apart, her body both crushed and expanded. Pain flared in her head, her stomach, along her nerve endings, cold like she’d never felt before settling into her middle with a throbbing ache.
Distantly, she heard Solmir curse again, felt hands press into the sides of her face, not gently. Her vision was blurry, but she saw the flash of black in her veins, something sharp pressing against her skin with every pulse.
“Dammit, woman,” Solmir snarled. “You can’t fade on me yet.”
He settled into a crouch before her. “Down here, magic has a price, Neverah.” He said it so calmly, but his fingers were tight on her temples, like he was trying to anchor her, keep her from dissolving. “On the surface, the Shadowlands’ hold was weak because its magic was weak. But when you use its power here, this place hooks in you. Becomes part of you. And you can’t handle that. This was a prison made for gods and monsters, and you are neither.”
Gods and monsters. Which one was he, then?
“I can fix it.” There was no softness in his pronouncement. It was all claw and tooth. “I can give you another anchor, something to pull power from that isn’t the Shadowlands themselves.”
She looked up at him, lips peeling back, speaking through the muddle of pain. “You killed Arick. You almost killed my sister. You used me.” A shudder, a rip of thorns in her veins. “I don’t want anything you’re offering.”
His hand closed around her arm, fingers long and elegant, the silver rings on them burning as he pulled her up. His face was all sharpness, knife-slash brows over those infernally blue eyes and a snarl on his mouth to match hers.
“I’m not offering,” Solmir said.
He sealed his lips to hers in a bruising kiss.
Shock made her still, but Neve was aware enough to realize that this wasn’t an embrace like any she’d been in before. It was more battle than kiss—she could feel his teeth behind his lips, the press of his mouth as good as a sword.
And as he kissed her, cruelly, something within Neve… shifted.
The pain of thorns tearing through her veins receded, shrank to a prick, then merely a sting. The pounding in her head lessened by slow degrees, leaching away the longer her lips stayed on Solmir’s, the contact pulling magic out of her like tugging on the end of a coiled string. The emptying was both welcome and devastating, pain and power receding in equal measure. Her body felt more grounded as it went, more her.
Fragile and human, controlling nothing.
Solmir broke their not-kiss, but his arms still encircled her, holding her up in case she collapsed. He smelled like pine needles and snow, far reaches and open sky.
The look in his eyes reminded her too much of those months when he’d pretended to be Arick. When he’d played at kindness, at—
She shoved away from him, the heel of her hand striking against his chest. “What did you do to me?”
“I gave you a new anchor. Tied your power to me instead of to the Shadowlands. From now on, you want magic, you get it from me first. I’m your vessel.” He caught her flailing hands, his face impassive, holding her still. “Our deal was one hit, Neverah, and you’ve already landed two.”
They froze like that, his hands shackled around her wrists, her face anger-warped and tear-streaked.
His expression could’ve been mistaken for impassive from far away. But there were scant inches between her and the fallen King, and Neve could see the burn of regret and fury and something like sorrow in his blue eyes. Slowly, he let go of her, bent to pick up his discarded coat and tug it over his well-muscled shoulders. “I did what I had to do.”
We do what we have to do.
Neve wrapped her arms around her middle, thinking again of how he’d been back on the surface. He’d acted like he cared for her, and she’d been stupid enough to believe it. It had been a ploy—she knew that now. A way to gain her trust. She wanted to ask him about it, ask him why he hadn’t just been content to wear Arick’s face, why he’d had to make it something so wounding. The only people who’d cared for her then had been Raffe and Arick, and to know that Arick’s caring hadn’t been real—hadn’t been Arick—bored a hole through her.
“You killed Arick,” she growled. “You don’t get to use his words.”
“They were never his.” Solmir’s eyes glittered. “They were mine.”
It was an opening. Almost an invitation to ask, to find out what he’d meant by his kindness, his care. Neve didn’t take it. She didn’t want to know.